Transnational Research in a Multipolar World
International Conference of the Max Weber Foundation

In Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany, the 1950s to 1970s were foundational decades for new social science sub-disciplines such as empirical sociology, gerontology, and oral history. Pioneering studies of ageing and the elderly were undertaken, and the earlier fixation of the social sciences on the study of youth was successfully challenged. But the pioneers of the new science of ageing, who became rightly famous for establishing new methods and asking new questions, were also a product of their times. They generally treated the ageing process in terms of the male life course and defined women (who were the majority of the elderly) as a group deviating from the norm. They also relied on concepts of family and marriage which obscured the way in which gender and gender regimes shaped the lives of the elderly. As a consequence, much about the social situation and the attitudes of over 60-year-old women in the second half of the 20th century remains unknown.

As a historian, I explore how old women navigated the gender regimes of their time by relying on a historical re-reanalysis of social science-generated sources, both quantitative and qualitative, from the 1950s to roughly 1980. In this paper, I will focus on the ways in which British as well as West German social scientists approached and treated their subjects of study, and the role gender played in their work.

Japanese society has undergone significant changes in gender relations over the past few decades. However, there still is persistent gender inequality, especially in the workplace and political representations. Today, women in Japan face inconsistent and often contradictory expectations regarding education, career, marriage, domestic work, and child care. In my presentation, I will discuss what has changed and has not changed in gender role ideologies by analyzing how women are portrayed in commercial films from 2000 to 2021.

The first and primary focus of this talk is the changes of predominant trends in postwar Japanese historiography, driven by remorse from the war and the search for the origin of democracy, coupled with the intrinsic development of research. The talk then proceeds to showcase an achievement from the recent trend of historiography, namely a new understanding of Japan’s entry to the western oriented international society. It reveals an important aspect of the world of the 19th century, and in this sense represents „World History“ made in Japan.